Transcript: Russia’s threat to Europe

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Russia’s threat to Europe’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about Russia and security in Europe. My guest is Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of Russia and a writer on world affairs for The Atlantic. So how serious is the Russian security threat to Europe?

Yulia Navalnaya, via interpreter
I would like Putin and all his staff, everybody around him, his government, his friends — I want them to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with my family and with my husband. They will be brought to justice.

Gideon Rachman
That was Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, speaking to the Munich Security Conference just hours after the death of the Russian opposition leader was announced. Navalny’s fierce and brave opposition to Putin inspired enormous admiration across Europe and indeed in much of Russia. But it didn’t save him from death in a remote prison. Navalny’s refusal to back down is, in all probability, what sealed his fate. Navalny’s death contributed to the dark atmosphere at the Munich Security Conference, and so did the news that Russian troops in Ukraine are now making territorial gains as Ukraine runs low on ammunition. Several European politicians have warned that Putin’s ambitions do not stop at Ukraine, and that the Russian leader could well attack a Nato state in the coming years. Anne Applebaum was at the Munich conference along with much of the west security elite, so I began our conversation by asking Anne about the mood in Munich.

Anne Applebaum
I have been going to Munich on and off for about 15 years, and this was the worst version of that security conference that I have ever been to, and there isn’t a close second. I think maybe the best way to explain it is to say that I talked to a German MP, a member of the Bundestag, who said to me, we’ve suddenly come to realise in Europe that we may wake up to face a world in which we are competing with three autocracies: China, Russia and the United States. And he wasn’t joking.

I mean, the fear is that a second Trump administration would not be exactly isolationist. It would be aggressively anti-European and it would seek to damage Europe. And I think it might not be wrong. And the behaviour of Trump out of office — he has no power right now, he has no formal job in the American government. And yet it seems that he controls this minority in the House of Representatives that is now able to dictate US policy since the summer. For months now, they have been blocking aid to Ukraine successfully, even though a majority in Congress supports it, a majority in the country supports it, the White House supports it. This pro-Trump minority has successfully done that. And it feels like a very bad omen for the future. It feels that Trump wants Ukraine to lose. He wants Russia to be empowered. And that’s very, very dangerous for Europe.

Gideon Rachman
And in fact, as well as that news about Trump’s statements about, you know, letting Russia do whatever the hell it likes, which was just a few days before the Munich conference. You then also had the incredibly grim, sad news just on the brink of the conference of the death of Navalny. How did that affect the mood, but also just the calculations? Does it tell us anything new about Russia?

Anne Applebaum
The added element of the death of Navalny was that the leader of his organisation and his wife were in Munich. They’d come to make a presentation or do some kind of event at the security conference. And it was almost eerie. I mean, Yulia Navalnaya, minutes probably after she’d learned this news, stood up in front of a room full of people and said a few words. I think it’s another illustration of the level of impunity that Russia enjoys and the level of aggression that Putin feels towards his own opposition as well as towards us. He believes or says he believes that the Russian opposition is somehow funded or paid for by the western world. His vision of how he should be able to rule, you know, that he decides what the law is, he decides what the rules are. He sees that the opposition to that comes both from inside his country, from people like Navalny, and from outside his country, from the US and Europe. And he’s determined to destroy both.

So I think there was a way in which the death of Navalny reinforced some of the other messages. And frankly, the fact that Trump has been unable to express sympathy for the family, anything like that, and not only that, made a weird posting on his own social media called Truth Social, in which he compared himself to Navalny. You know, I am a victim of the Biden regime, which is so sick and perverted that it’s almost hard to know how to cope with it. I mean, it just reinforced the larger message, which is that the United States could be on the brink of becoming a very different kind of player in the world.

Gideon Rachman
You wrote a classic: history of the Gulag. Does the news of Navalny’s death make you think that, you know, those events aren’t entirely in the past?

Anne Applebaum
So it’s very weird. I mean, I’ve written three books about Soviet history and all three of them I genuinely believed I was writing about things that would never happen again. And all three of them in different ways, the themes of them have re-emerged. I don’t think Putinism is Stalinism, and actually it’s quite important to understand what the differences are. Putin doesn’t do mass arrests. What he likes to do instead is single out particular people to set an example for others, and obviously he chose Navalny because of Navalny’s bravery.

But some of the seeds of the old system are clearly still there, the main one being that the law is what the person in charge says it is. That’s the total control of the court system, the total control of the media, the use of really vicious, ugly propaganda, contradictory propaganda in the case of Putin that’s a little different from Stalin as well. So it’s almost as if the seeds of Putinism you can find in the Stalin regime; they’re not exactly the same. But yeah, I mean, we see abuse of prisoners or torture of prisoners through putting them in very cold places and giving them very bad food. These are things we know from the Soviet past.

Gideon Rachman
And to add to the sort of litany of gloom and actually quite frightening news, you also have the sense that this inaction by Congress, the failure to supply Ukraine with ammunition, is now having an effect on the battlefront — Russia beginning to make gains. And Zelenskyy too was in Munich. How did that news from Ukraine affect the atmosphere?

Anne Applebaum
I mean, it’s part of the same story. Yeah. I mean, the Ukrainians are short of ammunition. I hear different statistics. The Russians have four bullets for every one that Ukraine has. There is overwhelming superiority in artillery. The Ukrainians still have a lot of tools in the toolbox. They’re still better at asymmetric warfare. They’re still better at drones. There’s been a problem in the last few months of the Russians learning how to use electronic warfare to block Ukrainian drones and Ukrainian guided missiles that the Ukrainians are working on overcoming that.

So I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily a big collapse coming, but yeah, they did just lose this kind of fortress city that they would not have expected to lose earlier on. And it is directly related to the lack of weapons. And is directly related to this blocking of Congress. Clearly, Trump has inspired this group of congressmen, and particularly the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to block this aid and you can see the effect of that decision on the ground and everyone knows it. So it’s part of the bigger story. Trump wants Ukraine to lose or wants Ukraine to become weak so that he can, when he takes over in January, which he thinks he will, that he will be able to dictate terms. And I think that’s the game right now.

Gideon Rachman
Now, Munich always hosts a very big congressional delegation, a bipartisan delegation. And usually the message is pretty clear: America is committed to European security and so on. But given everything you described, what was the reception of the Americans like and what was their behaviour like?

Anne Applebaum
Most of the Americans in Munich were people who support aid for Ukraine, who support Nato. Remember, the majority of Congress supports Ukraine and supports Nato. So we had several senior Republicans in the House, in the Senate saying very positive, encouraging things. Hakeem Jeffries, who is the minority leader of the House of Representatives, the Democrat leader in the House, was joking with somebody, saying, I’ve never had so many Europeans sidle up to me and ask me to explain discharge motions. This is a kind of parliamentary procedure in the US Congress that would allow Congress to vote on the aid bill even if the Speaker doesn’t put it on the floor. I’m told that’s how some civil rights legislation was passed in the past. How you can get around the Speaker.

So most of the ones who were there were very positive and enthusiastic and welcomed and so on. There was one exception, which was JD Vance, who is the senator from Ohio who has identified himself with Trump. But he was playing a somewhat weird game. He’d made very few public appearances. He made one, though, where he said, well, it’s all because we need to pivot to China. You know, we’re not interested in Europe anymore. And there were a lot of inconsistencies with what he said. I mean,the Republicans have given a lot of different versions for why they can’t pass the aid, and for a long time it was, oh, because we need to deal with our border crisis first. But when the Senate came up with a border crisis bill that was very tough, they turned it down. Now they’re saying, oh, no, it’s because we need to deal with China first. But these all feel like excuses. I mean, they’re hiding the basic story, which is that Trump wants some kind of deal with Putin. And I can’t tell you exactly how he’s gonna end it, but he wants to end the war in Ukraine by letting Putin win.

Gideon Rachman
You’re back in the States now, and Joe Biden has condemned what Trump is doing. And it seems to me from a distance to be trying to make this into an election issue, to say that what Trump is doing is disgraceful and against the, you know, American history and America’s interests. Do you think there’s any chance that that’ll cut through and actually make a difference in the election?

Anne Applebaum
Maybe some of it will. I mean, the election is still far away. A lot will happen between now and November. There are, of course, many other issues that move people — you know, abortion, women’s rights, other kinds of civil rights issues that people feel very strongly about. The American electorate seems to be only just waking up to the realisation that Trump is the candidate and they’re gonna have to think about him again. I think up until a few weeks ago, people still imagine there was some kind of Republican contest and people weren’t watching. Trump in the past has been a very polarising figure in that he brings out his base, which again, is a minority, but he also inspires people to vote against him. In 2020, we had the largest number of voters ever and more people voted for Joe Biden than anyone else ever in history. And that’s because Trump inspires a huge negative reaction. And it’s still very possible that we’ll get to that. And I know plenty of people who do think that will be the outcome.

I think these issues will play depending on how well they’re framed or described. They play when they’re connected to larger issues in the US about democracy, about America’s role in the world: what is America? What kind of a country are we? Although these are so-called foreign policy issues, they are pretty tightly bound up with America’s self-definition. I mean, are we a good country or are we a bad country? Are we a country that is aligned with dictatorships, are we a country that’s aligned with democracies? I mean, I think, again, those sound like foreign policy issues, but there are also issues of identity, and I think those will be at play once the campaign really gets under way.

Gideon Rachman
Back to Europe now. You mentioned that when we started this very bleak comment from the German politician about facing three autocracies, I had the feeling until quite recently that many Europeans were saying, well, yeah, sure, we’re worried about the possibility of a Trump presidency, but it’s too soon to start planning, too difficult to start planning. Do you think that’s changed now?

Anne Applebaum
Yeah, I do think so. I think people are planning. There’s a dilemma that people have between talking about it too much in public and then therefore somehow making it a self-fulfilling prophecy and taking seriously the need to prepare. So there’s both going on. There have been a few big weapons donations just in the last few days. The Danes gave all of their artillery to the Ukrainians — I think everything. And the Swedes have just come up with another big package. You know, there are a number of European packages coming. I mean, the countries that feel most threatened are eastern Europe, obviously, but also Scandinavia, particularly Sweden and Finland, who have just joined Nato. So the awareness is pretty high in those places and people are beginning to think about alternatives.

Everybody still hopes Biden will win and everybody still hopes the aid package will pass. It’s still might, I should say. The discharge motion might work. There’s a lot of pressure being put on Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker, from different directions, so it could still go the other way. But yeah, I think people are aware and they’re preparing in a way that they haven’t in the past. Remember also that during the previous Trump administration, the military threat from Putin still seemed very distant. It didn’t seem like something that was gonna be of concern for Germany. Now, it is. You know, there’s a real war in Ukraine. You know, there’s been a massive use of horrible violence against cities and the awareness that the Russians really are willing to destroy modern European cities is now with us. And that’s also a part of the explanation of the different mood.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And what’s the atmosphere like in the other country you know very well: Poland? I should add, your husband Radek Sikorski, has just been made Polish foreign minister in the new government.

Anne Applebaum
Much to my surprise. But yes.

Gideon Rachman
Well, congratulations. But it struck me that in that now very notorious Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin, that Putin almost went out of his way to kind of make threatening noises towards Poland and bizarrely accuse them of starting the second world war. Did the Poles notice that and feel that he was deliberately threatening them?

Anne Applebaum
Yes, and Putin has said this before. It’s not the first time he came up with that weird formulation. I mean, I think it’s a way of justifying his war in Ukraine. You know, Ukrainians brought it upon themselves. I’m attacking them because they inspired me to attack them. I mean, that’s the same kind of argument. It’s also a way of writing the Soviet Union out of the history of the second world war because in 1939, the Germans invaded Poland on September the 1st and the Soviet Union invaded on September the 17th and they actually partitioned Poland. And there was a period when there was a Soviet-German pact. And I think he’s trying to write that piece of history out.

So in Poland, the war in Ukraine has always felt very present. You know, Ukraine looks like Poland and the images on television look like things we know. I went to Ukraine. I’m part of a group that has been driving aid to the frontline. I went with a Polish friend of mine a few months ago and he said to me, you know, it was only when I got here I thought this landscape could be my landscape. It looks very familiar. The photographs look like pictures from the second world war. And so it feels very close. And of course, there are a lot of Ukrainians in Poland now. They’ve actually integrated pretty well, mostly. There aren’t refugee camps or anything like that. They’re mostly working in supermarkets or indeed in banks. I was in a radio studio in Warsaw a few months ago and there was a radio engineer from Donetsk, you know, and that’s just kind of normal now. So they’re there, it feels very close, and yes, the Poles are preparing. I mean, there are Russian information operations in Poland too. And there’s been a farmers’ strike to do with grain from Ukraine that has some real roots but may also have some roots in Russian agitation. So there’s some conflict inside Poland as well. But overwhelmingly the population is in favour of aiding Ukraine and is aware that they would be next on the list.

Gideon Rachman
Well, to summarise then, do you think by the end of the year that it’s not only possible but really quite likely that Europe will be facing a full-scale security crisis? Because if you combine a potential Trump victory with Russia making progress in Ukraine, the atmosphere in Europe could go from apprehension to something much closer to a sense of crisis really quite soon.

Anne Applebaum
I don’t wanna say that it’s likely, because there are a lot of things that could happen that would make it less likely. You know, there are clearly some cracks inside Russia. I mean, Putin, if he felt really secure and confident, he wouldn’t be killing his political opponents, right? The money could pass. It’s possible that a lot of people want it to pass. It might pass, you know, in the next few weeks and that could make a difference. Trump might lose. I mean, there are many reasons to think that that won’t happen, but it is a scenario out there that has to be taken into consideration. Yes, we could be a year from now, facing a security crisis on a new scale if we aren’t able to prevent it, either by making sure Biden wins the election or by making sure that Ukraine wins the war.

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Gideon Rachman
That was the historian Anne Applebaum ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join us again next week.

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